Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Ruin Academy - Casagrande Lab

Published in the book ARCHITECTURAL THEORIES OF THE ENVIRONMENT: POSTHUMAN TERRITORY

Third floor, professor's deck, Ruin Academy

Conceptualized
and constructed by the Finnish architect Marco Casagrande and his collaborators
in C-Lab, the Ruin Academy in Taipei is an independent architectural research
institution and an unusual public space for cross-disciplinary exchanges. Its
title both describes the lodging of an institution within an abandoned shell of
a building, and is a metaphor for the projected ruin of the fortified mentality
of academia. Gathering many disciplines around the ecological needs of the rapidly
changing city of Taipei, Ruin Academy advances a projective idea of the ruin as
the anticipated demise of hermetic thinking. The urban ruin recallsGilles
Clément’s description of the third
landscape, a marginal or
waste-space resulting from industrial use. Abandoned urban space can harbor
biological diversity and political value in that it lies outside, if only
temporarily, of the city's financial regime. The materiality and metaphor of the
garden situated at the urban margins drives C-Lab’s Ruin Academy design. This
case study will examine several of C-Lab’s key terms—the anarchist gardener, urban
compost, and the third-generation
city—to frame Ruin Academy’s posthuman design and ecological sensibility within
the environmental politics delineated by Erik Swyngedouw and Gilles Clément.

Ground floor, Ruin Academy.

Anarchist
Gardener

A term devised to align the anarchist’s
revolutionary urgency with the gardener’s ethos of careful cultivation, the figure
of the anarchist gardener has
multiple figurations in C-Lab’s work: the name of the Ruin Academy’s newspaper;
the title of a series of C-Lab’s architectonic interventions in Taipei and San
Juan, Puerto Rico; a character within C-Lab’s performative design installations.
In each case, the anarchist gardener manifests
the political and ecological bias in C-Lab’s approach to the built environment.

This colorful figure originated from
C-Lab’s close analysis of the Taipei basin: observing that parcels of the Danshui,
Xindien and Keelong River flood-banks were being farmed informally (and perhaps
illegally) by elderly women, C-Lab appropriated such “Grandmother-dominated
community gardens” as a model to define a range of practices that engage urban
ecology and operate outside of social conventions, and that hence take on an
“anarchist” quality.[1]
During urban research workshops undertaken with the National Taiwan University
Department of Sociology, C-Lab discovered that these informal plots and
community farming traditions overlapped with older formats of land ownership in
the city, suggesting that the anarchist gardener recovers a history of land-use
patterns around Taipei’s rivers. C-Lab's adoption “anarchist” draws on the
counter-cultural overtones rather than the politics of violence of the term:
sites for the “anarchist gardener” include urban farms, spontaneous zen
gardens, and other marginal spaces in the city.[2]

A similar insight led to the “Anarchist
Gardener” installations in San Juan for the Puerto
Rico Biennial in 2002. In this instance, Casagrande himself personifies the
character of the anarchist gardener, leading a six-hour pedestrian procession
from San Juan’s suburbs to its city center. Casagrande's “anarchist gardener”
in this instance disrupted urban flows. The procession created twelve
spontaneous “CityZEN gardens,” protesting the erosion of pedestrian space by
the city’s dominant car culture. Each CityZEN garden, composed from industrial
waste materials, adopted the size and
shape of an automobile’s parking space to mark the citizen’s resistance to the
total industrialization of the city.

As a broadsheet, the Anarchist Gardener demonstrates the range of C-Lab collaborations
in Taipei: the River Urbanism workshop blends sociology, civil engineering, and
agriculture in working to return the river’s edge to its formerly productive
ecosystem; the Urban Acupuncture workshop produces small-scale but socially
catalytic interventions into Taipei’s fabric; and the Urban Compost research engages the metaphor
and reality of industrial detritus as potential building material.

Ground floor, Ruin Academy.

Architectural
Activism

Casagrande’s urban development proposal
for Taipei’s Treasure Hill (2003) exemplifies the
extent to which performative strategies inform his understanding of
architectural activism. Treasure
Hill is an urban squatter settlement perched on the Guan-Yin hillside of
southwest Taipei, bounded by the Hsin-Dian river and characterized by improvised
tiers of terraced dwellings which contrast sharply with the orderly high rises
of cosmopolitan Taipei. Settled largely by immigrants and retired veterans, this
zone of Taipei has been targeted for demolition to make way for a new urban
park. Commissioned by the municipal government to propose an ecological masterplan
for the area, Casagrande found that that this settlement, perhaps because of
its illegal and marginal status, has evolved organically to operate according
to an ecological model: recycling and filtering grey water, using minimal
amounts of electricity (“stolen” from the city grid), composting organic waste,
and repurposing Taipei’s waste. Casagrande relates his
experiences of working on the site:

For
the ecological urban laboratory I had to do nothing, it was already there. What
I did was to construct wooden stairways and connections between the destroyed
houses and some shelters for the old residents to play mah-jong and ping-pong.[3]

Going beyond the masterplan, Casagrande
chose to protest Treasure Hill's demolition and instead to demonstrate the
area’s potential as an “environmental art work.” He argued that Treasure Hill served as the “attic” of
Taipei, containing
the urban memory of pre-industrial modes of inhabitation, and that the “attic” contents should be displayed
in a manner that was accessible to contemporary Taipei. The ideas for display ranged
from a free flea market of scavenged objects to night-time street theater,
featuring Casagrande in salvaged veteran’s clothing, torchlit and animating the
ruins of the riverfront homes already partially destroyed by city mandate. Casagrande advocated also that
Treasure Hill also be understood as a
preserve for matriarchical social structure and “squatter
self-sufficiency.” Together these two qualities immanent in the site comprised
what Casagrande identified as a localized ecological knowledge.[4]

Casagrande staged a second street performance
bringing the “memory theater” into central Taipei as an architectonic
installation: steel scaffolds bearing an array of plants and books contributed
by Treasure Hill dwellers were wheeled into the city center. This display
instigated a barter-like exchange with city bookstores: trading Treasure Hill
“memories” for books. That this exchange operates according to barter
principles renders the performance work consistent with the vision of the
ecological economy described by Clement in “The Emergent Alternative”:

Perhaps it is time to
think about what will, almost mechanically, best accommodate an ecological
regime for the planet. Asking what form tomorrow's currency would take is not
asking which currency will dominate (the dollar, the euro, the yen, the
euro-yen!) but rather it involves asking ‘what philosophy of exchange and
sharing is required for the survival of humanity on this planet?[5]

Clement's proposition that ecology represents
an alternative material economy, one that draws on the economic theories of
Bernard Lietaer and Alain Lipietz, implies that the ecological (post-human)
perspective describes a political project. C-Lab's Treasure Hill intervention
offers a critique of profit-driven markets by establishing a non-monetary exchange
of urban memory. The roving installation gave voice to the marginalized
Treasure Hill community through objects that spoke of the ecological efficiency
of this community.

C-Lab’s actual built interventions at
Treasure Hill were minimal: stairways,
platforms, and bamboo bridges, as well as a water drainage systems and
water-filtering gardens. A scaffold for
a new farmers’ market made of bamboo completed C-Lab’s project: a gesture
integrating an alternative to profit-driven mechanisms within what Casagrande
framed as a paradigm of ecological living. This project, titled Organic
Layer Taipei, attracted extensive media attention, an installation at the
2006 Venice Biennale, and sufficient political goodwill from Taipei’s municipal
powers to preserve the Treasure Hill settlement, albeit as a cultural site and
tourist attraction.

Second floor dormitory, Ruin Academy.

Third
Generation City

Casagrande’s intervention at Treasure Hill addresses
the concept of the third generation city
as an alternative to aggressive urban development;[6]at Ruin Academy, architectural
research, workshops and projects also seek to establish the ecological
principles of the third generation city.
If in Casagrande’s terms, the first generation
city refers to modest urban development respecting the topographical and
geological constraints of site, and the second
generation city is an industrial city that exploits natural resources to drive
its expansion, then the third generation
city operates on ecological rather than economic imperatives: “the third
generation city becomes the organic ruin of the industrial city.” The third
generation city is envisaged to be an organic layer that promotes alternative
modes of living as well as narratives, or "urban rumors," with the
potential to erode the productivist mentality of the industrial city. Existing
in the fragmentary organization of which the community gardens managed by
"anarchist grandmothers” of Treasures Hill serve as the paradigm, the third
generation city mirrors Clement's third landscapes.[7]
In Casagrande’s unabashedly utopian conception, we find echoes of a resistance
to capitalist regimes described by Clement, who writes of "a global consciousness developed out of
environmentalist thought [that] upsets the balance between companies and
individuals: a form of mandatory solidarity, inherent to the conditions of life
on earth, anchors our minds beyond conventional conflicts of interest."[8]

Clement's theoretical propositions for
landscape provide an important conceptual framework for understanding the
implications of Casagrande’s third generation city. Clément’s Manifesto of the Third Landscape stresses
the alignment of the concept with the Third Estate (the common people as
opposed to the nobility or clergy) as an ideal collective. The biological and
social diversity implicit in the third landscapes echoes the precepts of the
third generation city and its informal community gardens, which stand apart from
the ordered, industrialized city.
Casagrande locates evidence for this burgeoning sensibility in the
informal community gardens that proliferate in Taipei along river flood banks, in abandoned construction
sites and other plots of land the ownership of which is complex or unresolved.
He notes that these informal gardens may be transient yet may represent decades
of urban farming traditions, for example on the island in-between Zhongxiao
and Zhongshingbridges.
These informal
gardens operate outside of official urban planning as
the “voids in the urban structure that suck in ad-hoc community actions and
present a platform for anarchy through gardening.”[9]

Performative
architecture

C-Lab’s architectural creates
performative installations out of the tension between urban detritus and the
urban grid. In Ruin Academy, a similar performative tension is achieved by
playing living organic material against abandoned urban structure. Operating in
many ways like a microcosm of the third
generation city, Ruin Academy inserts an organic materiality into the very
fabric of its building. It is this layering of the organic into the built that
drive the architectural performance.

Ruin Academy occupies an abandoned
five-story apartment building affiliated with Taiwan’s JUT Foundation for Arts
& Architecture and the Aalto University’s SGT Sustainable Global
Technologies Center. All of the windows and interior walls have been removed to
create an interior space with plentiful natural light to allow vegetation to
grow freely within the building. Swathes of living bamboo and taro become the
primary spatial dividers. Plant beds with bamboo, taro, Chinese cabbage,
passion fruit, Asplenium nidus and
ferns line the interior walls. The irrigation infrastructure for this organic
layer is simple: six-inch cylindrical apertures puncture the walls, ceilings,
and floors, opening the building and allowing rainfall to traverse the building
section. The needs of vegetation override the conventions of human comfort, in
some sense suggesting that the vegetation's is the primary inhabitant of the
structure.

Ruin Academy operates as a metaphorical
and physical “hole in the industrial volume;”[10]
porosity to the exterior not only services the interior vegetation but also models
the program of the space. Programmatic holes include several fireplaces
(something of a leitmotif in Casagrande’s work) and a public sauna on the 5th
floor. These holes issue different atmospheric materialities—smoke, steam, and
moisture.

The section of the building provides
the most powerful expression of porosity. Each of the five stories of Ruin
Academy contains an element that escapes its built enclosure. The basement
ceiling is blown open to permit the growth of olive trees. On the first floor,
an open terrace gathers sunlight and emits smoke from its small fireplace. The
second story dormitory is dotted with vegetable plots, for which the irrigation
system involves rainwater streaming in from punctured walls and ceilings. On
the professor’s deck on the third floor bamboo trees to sprout from unglazed
windows. The fourth-floor lounge features another fireplace heat from which helps
fuel the sauna on the fifth floor, producing a plume of steam that intermingles
texturally with the fireplace smoke. The
floor, typically an inert surface in a building, is here refashioned as
mahogany bridges, white-pebble zen gardens, light and rainwells, or organic
plots: soft and shifting materialities underfoot stimulate the entire body,
following a line of enquiry delineated by Architecture Principe in the 1960s.
Yet at Ruin Academy, it is organic growth and decay, rather than the oblique surface
that best counters the regimented spaces of modernist rectitude and purity.

Following the example of Treasure Hill,
the community of Ruin Academy maintains a minimal environmental footprint with
rudimentary work and living spaces. “This is academic squatting,” suggests
Casagrande. The architect pairs contrasting worldviews, the institutionalizing
agenda of academia and the improvisational practice of squatting, to suggest a
new avenue for architectural research.[11]
Assembling participants from Helsinki University of the Arts and Design,
Tamkang University’s architecture department, and Taiwan University’s sociology
department, Ruin Academy’s workshops bring an ecological approach to a mapping
of the city’s informal activities. In this sense, lodging a constructed nature
within an architecture of decay dramatizes the incursion of the organic in the
city. Ruin Academy establishes a living fragment of the third generation city
that counters the modern spaces produced by global technology and standardized
construction methods.

An event-based program at Ruin Academy
draws not only on the PR-logic of contemporary art, such as pop-up venues and mediatic
urban theater, but also on the interpretation of the city as a platform for
informal and impermanent programs—from night-markets and street vendors to karaoke
and tai-chi stagings—that animate the city. Casagrande suggests in his texts
and extensive internet broadcasting that events tap the collective mind of the
city: “Something is going on . . . a whole city can be designed by rumors.”[12]
Ruin Academy, in its form and program, embodies a radical approach to
ecological living, challenging the architectural discipline to imagine urban
inhabitation as a process of intertwined organic systems and historical
architectures, accommodating the flux of rains and rivers as well as the city’s
changing demographics. Ruin Academy designs a posthuman assemblage shaped by
the forces of metabolic urbanization, in Erik Swyngedouw's terms: "Natureandsocietyareinthis waycombinedtoformanurbanpoliticalecology,a hybrid,anurbancyborgthat combinesthepowersofnaturewiththoseofclass,gender,andethnicrelations.[13]